My name is Natasha Jeptha and I am the Team Leader in Customer Service department based in head office, New Zealand.
What made me want to become a team leader in customer service was basically my passion for people. I love dealing with all sorts of people from different walks of life. In my role, the strength and skills I need, I guess, is ownership, I need to lead by example; I guess trust, integrity, and listening is also a very good skill that is required in the job.
A normal day for me is quite busy and full on. I would be organizing the workflow, making sure that we attend to all the queries, or aged queries I would say. Make sure the workflow is running smoothly and everybody knows what they're doing on the day.
An unusual day would be a quiet day when you don't hear the phones going, and there is this unusual strange quiet, there is no buzz and everybody talking on the phone at the same time.
The challenges in my role as Customer Service team leader is basically to make sure that everybody is motivated and our customers are dealt with in a timely manner, because I guess when we have our customers coming to us they're initially very unhappy customers, and the work that we do needs to restore the customer's faith back into the brand. We need to make sure that the customer wants to come back and wants to do business with ABG.
I have a very good team, they come from all different [backgrounds], it's quite diverse, so what happens is, they make us unique I think. And so, because of the experience they actually can deal with people from all different walks of life. We do have a social side to the team, we do lots of shared lunches and morning teas. In summer time, we actually do family barbecues and we go to the park, have a little picnic and that's always quite fun.
Well, the strangest thing we've ever done: a couple of years ago we had one of our directors leave, and everybody in head office made a farewell video for him, and we did the Gangnam Style dance, and that was kind of strange because everybody has to just learn it on the day, but it was fun.
What makes Avis Budget Group different is the fact that they are very centred around their staff and customers' needs. I've worked for a few other companies, and I've been with the company for 8+ years and I'm happy working here because the company has a culture of transparency, they look after their staff, they always have the customers' needs at heart.